Saving Meghan(24)

“It’s never going to end, is it?” Carl lamented as he bit into a Snickers bar procured from a vending machine. “It was a stomachache. She had a damn stomachache. Why couldn’t you have just given it some time?” he asked.

“That’s your opinion, not mine,” Becky shot back. She tried to look Carl in the eyes, but he refused to meet her gaze.

“No,” he said. “It’s the opinion of the heart monitor, her oxygen reading, her blood pressure, her temperature, and every other damn measurement they’ve taken. And it would be the opinion of her blood tests if you hadn’t made her so deathly terrified of needles.”

“That’s so unfair. I didn’t make her afraid.”

Becky worried Carl would hear the doubt in her voice.

“That’s what dealers say when they don’t take responsibility for the addict.”

“So I’m her pusher now, is that it?”

A mother seated next to a boy with his arm swaddled in a plastic bag of ice glanced up as Becky and Carl’s voices gained volume. Becky knew this timbre well, and seldom did they come away from the ensuing conversation feeling better.

“Stop putting words in my mouth,” Carl said. “You know what I mean.

“You brought her here, you called Dr. Fisher in, not me,” he continued, going red in the face. “What did it take to get him to do your bidding, Becky? A little flirting? Or did you do a deep dive to get his backstory so you’d really know how to pull the strings? Don’t think I don’t know how you operate. I’m not a fool.”

When they were young and in love, Becky would brag (no better word for it) to anyone who’d listen about how little she and Carl argued. They seemed to agree on everything from movies to ice cream flavors. What Carl thought was cool (back then: grunge, Silence of the Lambs, the internet), she thought cool as well, and it was not because of his influence. They were simply compatible. The term she kept returning to was “soul mates.”

In bed, she’d locked against Carl like a puzzle piece. She had waited two months to sleep with him, and when it finally happened, Becky believed she would never be with another man.

“I know you’re upset with me, and I can understand why,” Becky said now. “But we have to do what’s right for Meghan. We have to get answers.”

“I don’t think there ever will be an answer,” Carl said.

Becky eyed him warily. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means if we cure one thing, I have no doubt there will be some new illness plaguing her before long. It’s your history, you and your damn mother.”

Becky bit at her lip, which was the only thing keeping her from slapping Carl’s face.

“I can’t believe you just said that to me.”

But Carl was not necessarily off the mark. Becky hated to admit that her husband’s doubts had gotten into her head, burrowed a little hole in her brain, and forced her to ask herself that difficult question for which she had no answer: Am I crazy?

Becky knew the mind was a labyrinth of extreme complexity. It twisted and turned like the maze that had nearly swallowed Theseus as he battled the fearsome Minotaur. In her quieter moments, Becky wondered if she was more like Cora than she cared to admit. Was it possible she’d been exaggerating symptoms while at the same time putting ideas in Meghan’s head? Had she sent subliminal signals that were helping to perpetuate her daughter’s illness?

Cora, who defied all expectations by still being alive, had faked serious illness more than once. She’d complained of chest pain, stomach problems, or even fevers spiked with the help of hot baths filled with pounds of Epsom salts, sipping on hot tea to warm her body from the inside while the bathwater heated it externally. The rise in her body temperature lasted six to eight hours, long enough for the doctors to show concern. Her mother was a grifter—no better word for it. She taught herself to be an expert scammer, and the payoff was government-funded disability benefits that kept food in the fridge. Her phantom illnesses also kept Cora out of work and on the minds of everyone she suckered into caring.

A memory of Cora came to Becky. Her mother moaning in the doctor’s office, eight-year-old Becky telling the doctor what she’d been instructed to say: that she’d come home from school and found her mother passed out on the floor. She called 911, just like her mother had taught her to do. The doctor could not find anything wrong, but he wrote her a prescription for some medicine and made an appointment for her to see a specialist. He made sure the disability checks kept on coming.

In one of her rare moments of parental engagement, Cora had taught Becky and Sabrina how to pull off the ruse by lying to the social workers who’d occasionally pay them a visit. In hindsight, Becky had learned how to fake a disease at the hand of a true master. Surely had Cora known about mito, she would have latched on to that illness—with its strange, puzzling symptoms and no known cure—as a means of perpetuating her con.

I’m not my mother, Becky frequently told herself. And I am not crazy. But then she’d think of Sammy, and of the nursery where he’d slept for all of three months, eleven days, and fourteen hours before succumbing to SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome. The shock had never gone away. The hurt had never gone away. And her fear that Meghan was next had never gone away. How do you prevent that pain from happening again? You make sure your child has the best medical care in the world, that’s how.